The Smartest Guy in the Art Gallery?

"Immediate cash money."

Sounds good, no? We could all use some.

And that's what Jeffrey Shankman, a former Enron executive with a taste for contemporary paintings, has been demanding all summer from Historical Design Inc., a gallery on East 61st Street in Manhattan, claiming that the establishment sold him a fake.

In November 1997, Shankman walked into the gallery and "there personally examined in-hand, inspected, evaluated, and purchased" three works of art. The paintings had a retail price of $49,800, but Shankman asked for and got an art dealer discount and paid $40,000. He had them shipped to Texas by FedEx.

Shankman is more than a dabbler in fine art, at least according to the complaint that Historical Design filed against him in New York Supreme Court earlier this week. It claims Shankman has an interest in a Houston gallery, has sat on the Decorative Arts subcommittee at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and, back in the day, was part of a five-member committee that spent $3.5 million in Enron money to purchase fine art.

One of the paintings Shankman selected was a gouache on oil on board, Les Visiteurs by J. Lambert-Rucki. Some 11 years later, Shankman, described in the complaint as in "desperate need to "stem his cash flow problems," hatched a plan to "extort cash" from the gallery by claiming the painting was a "worthless forgery."

From June to September, Shankman made a series of demands, first asking for "immediate cash money in the amount of some $32,000 then more desperately raising his fraudulent extortion to demand some $150,000 in immediate cash funds."

The gallery asserts, "upon information and belief" that Shankman "altered" the painting while in his control, when he realized that a J. Lambert Rucki has not quintupled in price since 1997. He has denied all requests to view the painting and has kept on asking for "IMMEDIATE CASH ONLY." (The gallery's lawyers printed their complaint with the capital letters.)

The lawsuit says that Shankman has been threatening to "go public" with his allegations that the gallery sold him a fake. It names two art dealers to whom Shankman has said "in sum and substance" that the gallery is "'in the business of selling forgeries.'"

Yet the gallery has now gone public public with Shankman's accusations of forgery in its lawsuit. Still, the gallery does not want to talk about it. A call over to them about the lawsuit got this response: "We have no comment on that. Thank you for your phone call." Click.

Shankman still lives in Houston. In 2006, he started an energy-focused hedge fund called Trident Asset Management L.P., but Trident is apparently no more.

Karen Donovan